Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday April 11, 2014 @09:11AM
from the bring-an-umbrella dept.

An anonymous reader points out work at the University of Bristol into interactive, 3-D displays created by projecting light on misted water.
"These personal screens are both see-through and reach-through. The see-through feature provides direct line of sight of the personal screen and the elements behind it on the tabletop. The reach-through feature allows the user to switch from interacting with the personal screen to reaching through it to interact with the tabletop or the space above it. The personal screen allows a range of customisations and novel interactions such as presenting 2D personal content on the screen, 3D content above the tabletop or supplementing and renewing actual objects differently for each user."

Yeah that's why they use it in so many asthma inhalers and electronic cigarette fluids and lots of other things intended to be ingested.

So that implies that those are non-toxic? Ethyl alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, cough syrup, and countless others are meant to be ingested too - But that doesn't imply zero toxicity. Drink a couple of fifths of vodka with a bottle of percoset and tell me in the morning whether those ingestables had any toxicity.

Yeah that's why they use it in so many asthma inhalers and electronic cigarette fluids and lots of other things intended to be ingested.

So that implies that those are non-toxic? Ethyl alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, cough syrup, and countless others are meant to be ingested too - But that doesn't imply zero toxicity. Drink a couple of fifths of vodka with a bottle of percoset and tell me in the morning whether those ingestables had any toxicity.

Don't be stupid. Too much of anything can kill you. Skip the vodka and Percocet and just drink a couple of fifths of water in a short period of time. Let me know how well that works out for you. Hyponatremia [wikipedia.org] can be caused by drinking too much water. [cbsnews.com]

Is this anything like I have seen for years at Disneyland? I guess it was at least ten years ago they used to run a nightly show at the "Rivers of America" area and they would spray all sorts of water into the air and project images into it. It looked similar to the technologies where they were projecting moving faces onto heads in the haunted house.

I've seen the various design concepts before and they're all variations on the same intrinsically flawed theme; displays projected on either a liquid or gas that requires very still air, and a very irritating environmental system to manage, not to mention an image that is disrupted when a user 'interacts' with it because it's interrupting the 'canvas'.

I don't know of any scheme that could avoid these fundamental problems that will stop this from ever being a widely useful, much less consumer level technolo

I recall seeing this effect in some series from the nineties and earlier in a movie. It's an obvious but not terribly useful technique that we've know of for a couple decades at least. Did I drift onto the "idle" page by accident?

Right. Fogscreen [fogscreen.com] does this commercially. With better image quality, too. "Fogscreen" really is a fog screen. Here's Fogscreen in HD video [youtube.com], so you can see the quality of Fogscreen, which is OK for PR but not that great. They do interactivity, too.

Water screens [tsunamiscreen.com] are available, too. Those things can be huge, hundreds of feet long if desired.

All these technologies suffer from poor resolution. It's hard to keep a layer of fog smooth and flat. Resolution gets worse further from the nozzles, too.

This approach was shown at the Wired NextFest a decade ago and in South San Francisco around the same time, some company made a device that projected onto a stream of mist, creating a "holographic" display.